Tales from The Trenches Archive

Small devs > large devs

I worked for a subcontractor of one of the major platforms. If games wanted to be published on the platform, it had to go through us. During this time I decided that, as a tester, I adored the smaller developers while loathing the big ones.

We would frequently send back failure reports. The vast majority of these were “technically” failures, in that they didn’t meet the requirement but we didn’t really care (such as slight misspelling of official terms). The smaller developers were much more likely to send the game back to us with ALL these tiny bugs fixed. Not only that, they’d send us reports specifically addressing each issue, saying if it was fixed or not, and even sometimes how they did it.

The large developers, on the other hand, were more likely to pay the platform to get exempted from requirements, even serious ones which others wouldn’t be allowed to publish. They’d resubmit their games with little documentation on what they changed.

Two guesses which type the testers preferred, and the first doesn’t count.